Albert Comellas
Date of birth: 12th October 1984
Universitat de Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain)

He graduated in Physics and Meteorology in July 2006 at the University of Reading (United Kingdom). In his dissertation he studied the effects of gravity currents flow through obstacle fields by carrying out lab simulations.
He took a year off after graduating to travel around the world, and is currently a visiting student in CIMA Foundation to carry out his master research thesis for the Universitat de Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), through Dra. Maria Carme Llasat Botija. The research at CIMA, alongside with Dr. Antonio Parodi and Dr. Luca Molini, deals with uncertainty in severe rainfall events over Catalonia during 2008 and performance inter-comparison between different limited-area models. This research activity will potentially continue in the future into a PhD.

Mehdi Aïssi
Date of birth: 26th november 1979
Faculty of Sciences of Bizerte (Tunisia)

Mehdi is in charge to develop the first study of the bottlenose dolphin ecology around the Marine Protected Area of Zembra, Tunisia (RACSPA 97/2009). Oceanographic features of this area are too similar to those of the Marine Protected Area of Portofino, Italy, where Photo-identification protocol has been developed by CIMA RF and the Biology Department of the University of Genoa. Then, to study habitats preference and coast to coast movements of these marine mammals, he tends to acquire a common protocol of creating catalogue for marked individuals. Moreover, he’s interested of the use of cetacean passive acoustic monitoring systems as C-PODS.

Karina Quaini
Date of birth: 5th may 1977
CONAE (Consejo Nacional de Actividades Espaciales), Argentina.

Karina is a biologist, and she's currently doing a 2 years Master in Argentina on environmental emergencies using satellite data which includes 6 month on an ASI institute at Italy, in the frame of the Italian-Argentinean Satellite Emergencies System (SIASGE between CONAE and ASI). The SIASGE includes two types of satellites from both countries with different radar technology, both suitable for several applications (flood monitoring, topography, soil moisture retrieval, terrain changes and oil spill detection) and which its main results demonstrate that simultaneous acquisition of SAR images from Italian and Argentinean satellites may be an important task to improve the extraction of useful information from the data. She is here to learn about the application of this tool mainly on flooding scenarios.